It’s difficult to be born an agnostic in a middle-class Bengali family in Kolkata. Even more difficult to turn into one early in life unless something earth shattering has struck your childhood. If you have been dragged around pandals during Durga Puja, dutifully muttering your gratitude and your “pass-me-in-math” wish-list before thakur, you would know what I am talking about.

And unless you had the most bohemian parents in the world, you wouldn’t be found loitering anywhere near Patuapara. Patuapara, for the uninitiated, was a hub of creative activity and used to be abuzz with patuas (artisans who painted scenes from stories and fables on earthen plates) in the past. It’s a pale shadow of its former self now. With the patuas long gone, the para has turned into a dingy urban mess over the last few decades. Shacks fighting for space, serpentine cues at the tubewell and men bathing noisily around the roadside have taken over the quaint artistic hub for the patuas. Around this time of the year, however, a different sight can be seen in the concrete jungle. While the patuas might have made a quiet exit, the winding lane is home to several artisans. Artisans who take to the clay and paint only before the Kali Puja. And a walk down the lane around this time of the year is probably an agnostic’s dream come true.

Kali, for generations of Bengalis, has been the quick fix for everything from Monday morning blues and bankruptcy fears to “get-me-a-groom” and “give-me-a-raise” pleas. But what do you do when you run into a crude clay model, balanced on a salsa-like pose on a mass of clay, tongue sticking out, in this very Patuapara, and realise that you had thrown all your high school chemistry queries at her clay cousins? What do you do when pan-chomping, skeletal lungi-clad men drag your divine counterpart of Google by her head and place her amid a chaos of tins, cans, buckets, brooms, rugs and all the conceivable mundane, un-magical things in this world? What do you do, when you pick your way amid an army of clay dolls, some with just black faces, some with reddened palms, huddled together under a tattered blue canopy and realise that you have an answer to a slight shower (an umbrella, a Crocin afterwards), but the former more obviously didn’t?

... contd.